

FORESTS GEOWINO ON DUNES. 217 



lands, and the Batavians, the Angles, and the Frisons had no special 

 word in their idioms which designated a hillock of moving sand.* 

 Neither the great geographer Strabo, nor Plinj^ the encyclopedist, 

 nor any other writer of antiquity, mentions the existence of hills 

 driven by the wind, though this phenomenon was certainly of a 

 nature to strike them. Under a great many of the dunes of Gascony 

 trunks of oak and pine trees, with other substances, are discovered 

 buried in the sand, above the ancient level of the Landes. More- 

 over, some dunes still bear magnificent woods, which can count at 

 least several centuries of existence, and which probably were not 

 planted by man. Not far from Arcachon one may wander in a forest 

 where gigantic pines rise, unrivalled in France, and oaks 46 feet in 

 circumference. Title-deeds of 1332 speak also of forests which 

 covered the dunes of Medoc, and where the seigneurs of Lesparre 

 went in merry company to chase the stag, the boar, or the roebuck. 

 Montaigne,t too, writing in the middle of the sixteenth century, says 

 that invasions of the sand had taken place " for some time.^' Be- 

 sides, why should the Landese, like the Spaniards, give the name of 

 monts or tnontagnes to their forests, even those of the plains, if not 

 because their hills of sand were, in former times, uniformly covered 

 with trees ? 



Unhappily all those fine forests which once protected the low lands 

 of the sea-coast against the invasion of the sands, were success- 

 ively destroyed during the evil days of the Middle Ages, either by 

 barbarian invaders, or by improvident lords, or by the peasants 

 themselves. Even in the last century the King of Prussia, Frederick 

 William I., being in great want of money, caused the forest of pines 

 to be cut down, which extended without interruption over the dunes 

 of the Frische Nehrung from Dantzig to Pillau. The operation 

 brought him the sum of 200,000 crowns, but the moving sands in- 

 vaded the great inland bay, destroyed the fisheries, obstructed the 

 navigable channel, buried the defending fortresses, and modified in 

 the most vexatious manner the hydrographic economy of all those 

 parts.:}: In Holland and in Brittany this dismantling of the coast 

 has produced still more fatal results. On the borders of Lake 

 Michigan, and at Cape Cod (Massachusetts) the clearing of the shore 

 has also produced the formation of moving hills. § But the inhabit- 

 ants have only themselves to complain of ; the dunes are their work. 



* Staring, Voormals en Titans ; Marsh. t Essais^ livre iv. 



X Foss, Zeitschrift fiir die Erdkunde, 1861. 



§ Marsh, Man and Nature, 



